Presentation short abstract

This presentation examines how digital platforms in Chilean biodiversity conservation reconfigure governance, embedding neoliberal and biopolitical logics that marginalize local knowledges and reshape human–nature relations.

Presentation long abstract

Over recent decades, biodiversity conservation has undergone a profound digital transformation through platforms and AI-based technologies. Far from being neutral tools, these tecnologies reconfigure how nature is observed, understood, and governed. Drawing on emerging debates in political ecology, digital ecologies and STS, this presentation analyzes the case of Chile’s Fotomonitoreo platform, a state-led photomonitoring system designed to track animal presence in national parks, to explore how algorithmic conservation mediates governance. While presented as enhancing efficiency and precision, these technologies consolidate technocratic regimes that privilege computational rationalities over situated knowledges, reinforcing exclusions, surveillance practices, and introducing new forms of animal confinement as biopolitical digital strategies. Such dynamics align with neoliberal biopolitics, instrumentalizing conservation as a mechanism for capital accumulation and legitimizing territorial reconfigurations that prioritize ecotouristic value over ecological justice. By situating this analysis within Latin America - where research on digital conservation remains scarce - this work interrogates how ecological data and algorithmic modeling become laden with values, producing new territorialities and crisis narratives that override local decision-making. In doing so, it connects to the panel’s critical focus on the colonial and capitalist entanglements of ecological science, highlighting the need for alternative approaches that foreground relational and plural ecologies obscured by dominant digital infrastructures.